Saturday, March 16, 2013

Using disaster to create the government of your choice

Look at Greece and the neo-NAZI "golden dawn" party, and until recently
the Goldman Sacks lackey in charge of Italy, and his henchmen scattered
around Europe in government and banking. Debt to the big banks, among
other things, has helped to create disaster situations in which the very
rich have installed personnel and even entire political parties which
will benefit the growth of their enterprise and power.

When you look at the people of America, you are looking at Personal Convenience as
a main motivating factor. Helping Others is another but it doesn't
factor in this particular equation. When Personal Convenience is
directly assaulted, people will be unhappy and want it to change. When
it becomes bad enough, people will scream for change. Unfortunately the
powers that be fully understand this sadistic possibility and
opportunity: you can purposefully create the causes and conditions in
which people will demand Change no matter what, and will jump to demand
placed into power, any who shout that they can deliver it. Even those
who have created the problem in order to be placed into power.

This has occurred two particular times in recent history:

1. The Bush Disaster Family and their ties with OPEC caused an oil
embargo which made President Carter appear weak and foolish. Americans
were significantly impacted and they demanded Change. Bush also managed
to get reportedly get Iran to hold the hostages until Reagan took office
to again make Carter appear weak and foolish. Worked like a charm and
disaster waltzed right in. From Reagan we see the beginning of the
destruction of unions and the middle class, the start of the long game
which is currently reaching fruition.

2. The major Bush supporters Enron met with Schwarzenneger before
purposefully shutting down portions of the California power grid, a
series of events named "rolling blackouts". Californians wanted Change. A
run-off election occurred and Schwarzenneger waltzed right in and
immediately began hacking away at infrastructure serviceperson pensions
and unions, schools, etc. And Enron were forgiven the rulings against
them to the tune, IIRC, of pennies on the dollar.

Now Michigan is an entirely new type of situation. Rachel Maddow warned us about the far
right "tea party" (read: Koch Brothers) politicians in Michigan
steamrolling the political process as well as wishing to grab up the
bequeathed beach-front property in otherwise impoverished,
African-American Benton Harbor. Pontiac, Benton Harbor, and shortly
Detroit are under the tender loving ministrations of "emergency
managers" who through appointment by the State, are free to do as they
will with all resources. And Wall Street have walked away from Detroit's
distress to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in profit.

Forcing cuts upon the poor while the rich benefit is "austerity" as
seen in Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, and now America.

Although Big Ed (love him) appears to not see that the "emergency
manager" process is a planned scam, his overview of its effects is
superb and frightening:

Since Lou Schimmel became Pontiac’s emergency manager in
2011, he has privatized the Department of Public Works, outsourced
police services to the Oakland County sheriff’s office, and turned over
the city’s fire department to nearby Waterford Township, killing the
public sector unions which represented the city’s firefighters and cops.
He’s put every city property, including City Hall, up for sale and cut
the city’s public employee workforce by about 90%. And he’s done it all
without the consent of the city council.

Across Michigan, emergency managers installed by the state are using
sweeping powers to privatize public services, lay off city employees,
and weaken public sector unions with little standing in their way. Now
the same thing is likely to happen in Motor City, one of the industrial
centers of America.

Ostensibly a mechanism for rescuing insolvent Michigan cities and
school districts from the brink of bankruptcy, the Emergency Management
system has turned into a way for unelected officials to break up public
sector unions, privatize public services, and drastically shrink the
size of municipal governments. Currently, five Michigan cities are being
administered by emergency managers—all of whom were appointed by the
state’s Local Emergency Financial Assistance Loan Board (ELB).

When a city fails to meet certain financial benchmarks, the state can step in.

To have the state step in, it helps to have a Koch Brothers-funded "tea party" politician as governor.

"...it secures a dream of the anti-union Koch brothers and the
American Legislative Exchange Council, whose associates are
well-represented among Snyder’s donors, and whose economic agenda has
been ascendant within the modern GOP."

Rachel Maddow warned in 2011:

"Last night on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show, Maddow
explained that Michigan Republican Governor Rick Snyder is pushing a
bill through that will give ultimate governmental power literally to
corporations, thereby using shock doctrine tactics to create a dystopian
government. Synder’s bill not only goes after collective bargaining
rights, but does in fact seem to represent the Republicans’ final
solution to killing democracy by enabling the replacement of elected
officials, dissolving entire city’s government and handing them over to
corporations. Snyder calls his 'budget bill' a 'shared sacrifice,' but
it gifts corporations with 1.8 billion in tax breaks while hitting
citizens with harder taxes, including seniors and other vulnerables, and
cutting essential services to an already suffering region."

dtom67 said in a related thread:

The " derivitives" are usually the culprit... Municipal
officials use some byzantine derivative bet ,that they do not really
understand, to fund pensions. The Bet crashes and they city owes a
shitload of money to wall street.
This allows the city to go bankrupt and void its Union contracts. It
has finally been understood that the key to breaking unions is to
bankrupt those they work for."

So in Michigan the Corporatocracy has now completely bypassed the people of the country as a tool for installing the machination of their choice.

Note that dtom67 of Democraticunderground.com is correct regarding derivitives:

"As the downtrodden African-Americans and
whites who make up what’s left of the City of Detroit’s 700,000
resident are about to have their fundamental human rights taken away by
the state of Michigan in the coming weeks, new information is coming out
as to who and what is responsible for the Detroit’s financial problems.

As anyone with a brain can tell you, for
nearly 40 years, Detroit residents have been getting the shaft in
Detroit’s slide from thriving metropolis into a dystopian wasteland that
once only existed in the imagination of some Hollywood Science Fiction
screenwriter. As the body count of victims is being assessed by finance
experts and Michigan Governor Rick Snyder’s office, it is becoming
clear there were actually some major winners in Detroit’s demise and no,
former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick hasn’t been mentioned yet. Even if he
is, it appears there were bigger winners than members of the Kilpatrick
family.

It appears that UBS, Bank of America and
JPMorgan Chase enabled about $3.7 Billion of bond issues to cover
deficits, pension shortfalls since 2005 and with interest these
liabilities rose to $15 billion including money owed to retires and the
city employees pension fund.

These bond sales cost Detroit $474
million for underwriting expenses, bond insurance and the handling of
interest rate swaps. This total cost is equal to the Detroit’s budget
for police and fire protection for that same period."

Note that energy was involved twice, and that the right wing pulled
it off. Energy and such are issues which are not effected by voting, and
the right and the rich will use such lateral stunts to direct politics
in their preferred direction. See the Koch brother article I posted
yesterday.

Read "The Shock Doctrine" and "Confessions of an Economic Hitman"
and "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room". Debt and disaster are used
to ripen conditions for control and profit. You have to break a few eggs
to make an omelette. And debt is the main tool being used as far as I
can see to ripen conditions in Europe. This may be why it is seemingly
impossible to get politicians to do something, anything about the $1
trillion of US student loan debt. Our young are already in their thrall.

The Citigroup "Plutonomy" memo mentions the rich wanting right-wing,
anti-immigration governments which will aid in profitable globalisation
efforts. The very rich are most certainly engaging in their creation as
we post. Voting will not slow down these corporations. But note that
the memo lists their first and most significant fear, which is of a
populist uprising demanding fair income equality and action against
right-wing, corporate and bank-friendly politics.